Learning English is an important aspect of post-migration settlement in Australia, and new migrants with beginner to intermediate proficiency are strongly encouraged to attend government-funded English language classes. Underpinning the framing and delivery of these classes is a commitment to the discursive construction of Australia as an English-monolingual nation state, in which the sooner a migrant’s English proficiency develops, the sooner they will be able to get a job, thereby achieving an important benchmark of successful inclusion in Australian society. Within this construct, the English language learner is seen as someone linguistically deficient and the ways that gender and race mediate language learning are never problematised. This paper reports from a recent longitudinal ethnography exploring the impact of English language learning on gendered subjectivity, specifically in the context of transnational migration. Broadly, the study finds that the effect of attitudes to language and race in Australia, as well as the ways that migration is a gendered process, are deeply involved in the impact that learning English has on aspiration and selfhood in this context. Of particular relevance to this talk are findings on the way language and race mediate identities of belonging and exclusion across social and workplace interactional domains.